Philosophy of
science

Science vs. Religion, from the Renaissance to the
Enlightenment

The shift in the western mind from the medieval to the modern
was underpinned by the growth of science. However a two hundred
year long intellectual battle was to take place between the
established Church and the emerging empiricism, before the
Enlightenment could flourish. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
challenged the view that the Earth was at the centre of the
universe. He suggested that the observational evidence would be
better explained by the theory that the earth orbited the sun.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) argued for the use of experiment rather
than deduction as a means to increase knowledge. Johannes
Kepler's (1571-1630) employment of observation and mathematics
enabled him to supplant the Pythagorean (ancient Greek
philosopher Pythagoras' (c. 530 BC)) theories of perfect heavenly
spheres by showing how planets moved in ellipses. Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642) was placed under house arrest for agreeing with
Copernicus.

Despite resistance from the religious authorities, the success
of science in explaining and predicting the natural world could
not be ignored. René Descartes (1596-1650) thought he had found
a rational foundation for science based on his arguments for his
own existence and the existence of god. God, he argued, would not
deceive our senses. This felicitous reconciliation between
Cartesian rationalism, a belief in God and the support for
empiricism did not survive for long.

The Ascendancy of Science: The Enlightenment to the Twentieth
Century

Isaac Newton's (1642-1727) advances in physics based on his
empirical and inductive methods were hugely influential to the
philosophers of the Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
thought that Newton's laws could be shown to be true by reason
and that the scientific approach could explain the phenomenal
world (the world of appearances). He retained a dualistic view of
the universe: human beings lived in a world of rationality,
autonomy and morality whilst the material universe which they
observed was explained in terms of cause and effect.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) argued that
human thought developed through a number of stages: mythical and
religious, metaphysical and its final positive stage which was
characterised by the systematic collection of observed facts. He
thought that these "Positivist" methods should now be
turned to the study of society. With his invention of sociology,
Comte was suggesting that our knowledge of human beings could be
explained using similar methods to those of the natural sciences.

The revolutionary twentieth century

Karl Popper

Karl Popper (1902- 94) was critical of the inductive
methods used by science. The empiricist David Hume (1711-76) had
argued that there were serious logical problems with induction.
All inductive evidence is limited: we do not observe the universe
at all times and in all places. We are not justified therefore in
making a general rule from this observation of particulars.
Popper gives the following example. Europeans for thousands of
years had observed millions of white swans. Using inductive
evidence, we could come up with the theory that all swans are
white. However exploration of Australasia introduced Europeans to
black swans. Poppers' point is this: no matter how many
observations are made which confirm a theory there is always the
possibility that a future observation could refute it. Induction
cannot yield certainty.

Popper was also critical of the naive empiricist view that we
objectively observe the world. Popper argued that all observation
is from a point of view, and indeed that all observation is
coloured by our understanding. The world appears to us in the
context of theories we already hold: it is 'theory laden'.

Popper proposed an alternative scientific method based on
falsification. However many confirming instances there are for a
theory, it only takes one counter observation to falsify it: only
one black swan is needed to repudiate the theory that all swans
are white. Science progresses when a theory is shown to be wrong
and a new theory is introduced which better explains the
phenomena. For Popper the scientist should attempt to disprove
his/her theory rather than attempt to continually prove it.
Popper does think that science can help us progressively approach
the truth but we can never be certain that we have the final
explanation.

Thomas Kuhn

Thomas Kuhn (1922- ) was critical of the
simplistic picture that philosophers had painted of science. Kuhn
looked at the history of science and argued that science does not
simply progress by stages based upon neutral observations. Like
Popper, he agrees that all observation is theory laden.
Scientists have a worldview or "paradigm". The paradigm
of Newton's mechanical universe is very different to the paradigm
of Einstein's relativistic universe; each paradigm is an
interpretation of the world, rather than an objective
explanation.

For Kuhn the history of science is characterised by
revolutions in scientific outlook. Scientists accept the dominant
paradigm until anomalies are thrown up. Scientists then begin to
question the basis of the paradigm itself, new theories emerge
which challenge the dominant paradigm and eventually one of these
new theories becomes accepted as the new paradigm.

Paul Feyerabend

Paul Feyerabend thought that
the superiority of the modern scientific method should not be
assumed. He argued for an anarchist approach to knowledge: we
cannot predict what shape future knowledge will have, so we
should not confine ourselves to one universal method of gaining
knowledge. Feyerabend agrees with Kuhn that the history of
science is the history of different viewpoints, and for
Feyerabend this means that what counts as 'knowledge' in the
future may have paradigms we cannot yet know. As we cannot yet
know them, we should not attempt to forbid future intellectual
enterprise by attempting to define one narrow dominant paradigm
of knowledge using the model of physics.

Science and the post-modern World

In the 20th century, Einstein's theory of relativity overthrew
the Newtonian paradigm that had been dominant since the
Enlightenment. This change of paradigm made philosophers aware
that the fundamentals of a scientific understanding were not a
static unchanging set of natural laws, rather these paradigms
were human interpretations of phenomena as much dependant on the
community in which they surfaced as on the nature of reality
herself. Scientific explanation can no longer be looked upon as
objective and neutral. At the boundaries of science new paradigms
are emerging to challenge the current orthodoxy, it is an open
question as to how the science of the next century will develop.